More than 15 years of experience with treatment-free, small-cell beekeeping
 How can we achieve treatment-free beekeeping?THE viable way to resistant bees, basics by Ed&Dee Lusby |
Varroa resistant bees – Everything you can read here I achieved through the instructions of Ed&Dee Lusby.
It is now clear that beekeepers, both amateur and professional, play a major role in the catastrophic state of bees. The bee Apis melifera is no longer able to survive on its own in large parts of the world. The reason is that, for many decades, bee management has been geared more towards the needs of beekeepers than their own. As a result, bees have forgotten vital behavior patterns. This must be corrected. For decades, bees have been threatened by Varroa mites and are intensively treated with chemicals and acids. All beeswax is now highly contaminated with chemical residues, a situation that must be addressed.
Changes in bee management, feeding and breeding are the keys to treatment-free beekeeping.
The following problems, which most beekeepers use, are detrimental to the bees and must be changed:
Changes in management:
-bee cells are too big
Here are the evidences that bee cells were artificially enlarged by beekeepers more than a hundred years ago: evidences – bee cells were much smaller in the past
evidence that the bee cells were smaller in the past, denial of history (Erik Österlund)
-The natural arrangement of the combs in the beehive
One of our colleagues from USA has observed how feral bees build their combs. His name is Housel and he found out that these bees build their combs in a specific order.
-The importance of the drones or the true heroes in the beehive
In any case, you should omit the usual Varroa drone catch comb and retrain the bees to only use a specific portion of each comb for drone rearing – this knowledge was lost to them through the beekeepers’ usual drone trimming. We also recommend removing brood frames that have more than 10% drone brood in the brood nest to encourage brood nest hygiene in our Apis mellifera worker bees.
– do not use chemicals in the hives, because bad colonies must be allowed to die
– Healthy microfauna in the bee hive – imperative!
There used to be 100 different mite species in the bee hive that lived together without any problems – what can we learn from that?
– make every effort to use residue-free wax – the wax – practically all beeswax is highly contaminated with chemical residues
 Cell size of bee honey comb |
– leave as much honey as POSSIBLE in the hive for the winter
– Treatment free beekeeping – the inevitable crisis – Collapse and Recovery
I followed John Kefuss’s bond method and deliberately infected my small-cell colonies with Varroa at the beginning. Years later, I did the same with the American foulbrood that had arrived here. Some colonies in remote locations were deliberately infected with stringy comb from other colonies. The disease never broke out in the small-cell colonies.
– you have to follow the instructions exactly and leave nothing out, then it will work
Of course, I made big mistakes at the beginning, especially in the breeding selection and had to pay heavily for it
– Avoid migration of bee colonies
Experience has shown that moving bee colonies is very detrimental to the immune system of a bee colony.
Recipe for success and practical tips for small cell and treatment free bees |
Changes in the feeding of bees
– no feeding of the bees with sugar syrup and pollen substitute
A common practice among beekeepers is to remove all the honey from the hives and replace it with sugar syrup. Sugar syrup shortens the life of bees – scientific research
A paradox is the common claim among beekeepers that bees cannot survive the winter on their own honey.
Changes in breeding
Today’s efforts to produce Varroa-resistant bees are based mainly on genetics, but our experience has shown that this is absolutely not enough and all the above changes in bee management must be made.
– Beekeepers’ breeding selection criteria over the past 100 years have been based almost exclusively on the benefits to the beekeeper. This must be radically changed, and priority must be given to the needs of the bees.
– Naturally, native bee breeds are preferable, as they are adapted to the climate and flora. (Here on the island, we have an endemic black bee, Apis melifera melifera, which is found only here, haplotype A15.)
If this is ignored and southern bee breeds, such as the Carnica or the Ligustica, are used in northern countries, problems are inevitable.
– When breeding queens, it’s important to remember that to achieve true genetic improvement, you need to have access to a wide variety of genetics. Here you can see the breeding criteria used by Ed & Dee Lusby: Bee Breeding in the Field: Part 5 – breeding criteria
– Rudolf Steiner already said 100 years ago that if we continue with the kind of queen breeding we practice, the bee will be sterile in 100 years. And he wasn’t entirely wrong.
The bees under threat – a possible solution
The current situation of the bees has reached a very alarming state.
More and more diseases occur and there is no fundamental change in perspective. Bees suddenly disappear from thousands of colonies without any obvious reason. The beekeepers have to make use of chemical drugs and other chemical substances in the hive to fight diseases. The conclusion reveals, that the bee is not able to defend itself by using its own resources against disease. This means their immune system is under severe attack.
The Varroa, for example, shows this problem very clearly. We brought the mites from Asia, where the bees had lived with them for thousands of years without any problem, and all of a sudden all of Europe’s bee colonies collapsed under the Varroa.
There is no animal in nature that kills its host, as it would destroy its chances for survival. The Varroa does. Why?
The bee exists since more than 100 million years; man is much younger, only 1.5 million years. Us, the beekeepers, have started to interfere in the bee’s concerns about 100 years ago. And now we discover the bees’ immune systems is weakened. Can it be assumed it has something to do with our way of interacting with the bees? It is very likely.
If a living being is constantly exposed to severe stress factors it will weaken its immune system over time. We found that there are unintentional, or intentionally used beekeeping methods causing severe stress to the animals. There are also more toxins and chemicals in the hive and nature.
We want to explain in detail what these stress factors are, and how they are avoided in order to guide the bees back to harmony with nature and restore their immune system.